Fossil Fuel Research Paper

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Introduction
The highest energy consumption rate in today’s world is fossil fuel. They are our best friend in daily life. Thousands of years ago, due to a drastic change in the earth, fossil fuels were formed.

The fossil fuels include petroleum (oil), coal and natural gas. Fossil Fuels are nonrenewable energy. 90% of U.S. energy consumption is nonrenewable energy including oil 36%, natural gas 27%, coal 19% [1]. Fossil fuel was formed from the remains of animals bones and plants that lived millions of years ago in a marine environment before dinosaurs.

Oil is one of the best energy in the world because oil only needs little amount to produce a large amount of energy, it has low cost, also oil is easy to be stored and transported.

How is …show more content…

Oil is one of the highest producers of calorific value of energy. Calorific value is the heat produced by the combustion of a unit weight of a fuel. The greater the value, the more effective it is. Diesel’s volumetric density is about 40 and the gravimetric density is about 50. Batteries volumetric density is about 1 and the gravimetric density is about 3. Therefore oil has a very high volumetric density and gravimetric density compared to other energy resources.

Reason #2 Low Cost
The second reason, that oil is the best energy, is because it has low cost. Fossil fuels are available all over the world and the way to extract energy from them are also not that expensive. This does not need a hard setup. Unlike solar power or wind turbines whose cost are too high, fossil fuels have low cost as compared to them. The high cost prevents many people from installing wind turbines or solar panels at their home. For example, from Table 1, conventional coal’s levelized capital cost is 60, solar thermal levelized capital cost 195. From Table 2, an average cost of coal and natural gas are 4-5(cents per kWh). Average cost of wind is 4-10(cents per kWh), geothermal is 5-8(cents per kWh), biomass is 8-12(cents per kWh) and solar is 15-32(cents per kWh). It shows nonrenewable …show more content…

Oil are easily stored and transported from one place to another. There are many ways to transport oil. The first one is pipelines. Pipelines are efficient because most are buried, largely unseen. The second way is rail transportation. Railroads are efficient means of transporting crude oil and other fuels. There many other ways to transport oil.
Many people are concern that there are lots of leaks in oil tankers or ship getting drowned deep in the sea that were carrying crude oil to get refined. The crude oil contains some toxic substances which when mixed up with water pose serious hazards to aquatic life. There has been few major disaster such as the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the BP accident in the Gulf of Mexico.
Many countries set up higher safety standard to prevent oil leak. Under the Canada Shipping Act, 2001 require any tanker built after July 6, 1993, to be double hulled to operate in Canadian waters. A double hull is a type of hull where the bottom and sides of a vessel have two complete layers of watertight hull surface.

Other pros and cons -- rebut

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